Alice in Acidland

Another really great Something Weird Video. Made 1968, Alice in Acidland is part LSD scare film and part psychidelic trip film. It's actually really swell. The first half that shows `Alice' as a naïve girl, who gets invited to a pool party. While there she gets drunk for the first time and then has a bath with the female host of the party. After that first encounter Alice becomes apart of that hip group. She frequents these orgy parties and meets Animal. The orgy scenes and the nudity are really tasteful and very pin-up like. At one party a new girl who wants to be apart of the group takes acid and then is raped by Animal. Alice takes acid afterwards, even though she was totally aware of what happened to her friend. After reflecting on the disturbing event that her friend suffered she trips hard. Much like Wizard of OZ, Alice in Acidland turns from black and white to full psychidelic color. There are a lot of super-imposed images of her friend and a lot of Alice dancing nude with patters and colors projected on her. I found the whole movie to be interesting to watch. The black and white half was shot well for the time and actually looks better than some later films. The tripping scene was very much like an opening sequence for a James Bond movie. It was traditionally psychidelic, not really intense like Psyched by the 4-D Witch. In the end a lesson is supposed to be learned. But who knows, it looked sort of fun.

This is a kind of spoof of Reefer Madness. I hope they got govt funding for this, that would have been a great joke. This is on the surface a movie warning you against the dangers of doing drugs. There are two things which belie that. One, there's an awful lot of nudity in it, like half the screen time. Two, supposedly Alice does the voice over but at the end she's shown to have lost her mind because of drug use, so how can she do the voice-over.

The other problem is the lead. While Alice might've been a beauty from afar, she's far from beautiful. She's chubby, very much so, even by the standards of 1968, since the other girls are at least NOT chubby. Fair's fair, the men are also chubby, and rather unappealing too.

Plus, these women look way too old. The lesbian partner of Frida looks not a day under 38, and the other 'school' girls all look 25.

I bet in 1968, this could have been arousing, but now? Not so much.

And I take offense to the phrase "a known lesbian". As if being a lesbian is a crime! 40 years ago, you say? We don't do that anymore, you say? What do you think about:

• "in a COMMITTED gay relationship" and

• "openly homosexual" and

• "gay LIFESTYLE" ???

Alice in Acidland (1969)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

How "entertained" you are by this 55-minute nudie will be determined by how badly you need to see nudity. Alice (Sheri Jackson) is taken to a pool party by her friend Frieda and it turns out that this party is being hosted by a lesbian. Not only is a lesbian hosting the party but she's serving up alcohol and weed, all of which are things that our young Alice has never tried. Soon the beautiful teen heads down the dangerous world of sex and drugs. Take out the nudity and ALICE IN ACIDLAND would be just like those exploitation pictures from the 1930s. Films like REEFER MADNESS, SEX MADNESS and THE COCAINE FIENDS are exactly what this movie is going for but of course the biggest difference is that this one here has wall-to-wall nudity. If you're just being released from an unknown country and haven't been able to get access to any sort of nudity then you might be entertained by this thing. All others are going to be bored out of their minds because outside the nudity there's really nothing going on here. Heck, even the nudity itself gets boring after a while even at just 55-minutes. The biggest problem is that there's really no sort of story going on here as we just get random scenes of people doing drugs or making out. The film's "story" is told via narration and this too gets very boring after a while. The title and poster art makes you think that you're getting into something wild but even by 1969 standards this thing is dull. The film's B&W images turn to color for the final ten-minutes but this doesn't add anything.

The first part of this film is extraordinarily inept. It has a voice-over instead of dialogue, and tells the tale of a college girl who smokes marijuana and becomes a crazed lesbian. At the end of the film she drops acid and has a full-colour lesbian fantasy, that inevitably drives her insane. The wild lesbian fantasy is not too badly done, and requires extensive use of the pause button.

Alice in Acidland: 2/10: Filmed with only narration and a jazz soundtrack that sounds like a lot of bad smack was involved Alice in Acidland is your Daddy's porn.

There is no acid per see in the first two thirds of Alice in fact the girls become lesbian potheads with a few drinks of rum. This is basically an old black and white bump and grind shoot. It contains a fairly unattractive cast, pretentious narration, missing characters let alone scenes, mind numbingly boring sex and a plot out of a C-grade Quincy episode.

My favorite scene an unnamed girl in a group shot looks directly into the camera with a true deer in headlight stare gets her direction shouted at her does something for thirty seconds then forgets and stares at the camera again.

Of course 1968 was a long time ago and this was a one-off for most of the cast. So sit back and ask yourself one question. "Honey the second lesbian isn't that Mrs. Peterson from our church?"